Someday I'll Figure Out What This is About

With the advent of modern technology, I’m thinking that I’m going to have a lot more photos that I want to organize and publish, so I’m reassessing my self-hosted Gallery2 setup that I’ve been using for a year or two.

About the only things I can say that I genuinely like about the current situation is that I have (nearly) complete control over the server and my photos. I picked the Gallery software just because DreamHost has a “one-click install” for it and, while it does it’s job, I can’t say I’m super excited about the software itself. There are a lot of things that it could do better (bulk operations for simple tasks like rotating photos springs to mind) and there’s really not a whole lot that it does to endear itself to me. I’ve been spoiled by Web 2.0, Ajax and slick interfaces, and Gallery’s doesn’t really cut it any more.

To hurry me on my search for something else, the day we got the camera and I tried to upload photos to my album I discovered that I’d inadvertantly hosed some of the admin controls when I’d upgraded Gallery a few weeks before. While I was trying to fix that, I also downloaded Google’s Picasa just to try it for managing photos locally, and when I got fed up trying to fix Gallery (I did eventually get it working) I tried out Google’s Picasa Web Albums.

Picasa’s got a pretty nice interface for managing batches of photos. I think I’ve fully come around to the the idea of using tags rather than (directory) hierarchies for organizing things, and Picasa allows this sort of approach by tracking your albums independently of the location of photos on your hard drive. I’ve adopted a system of grouping photos in filesystem directories named after the date that I pulled them off the camera, but I can put them in whatever albums I want. The one thing I haven’t quite figured out is how to move photos on disk (for example, to move them to a new hard drive) without screwing up the albums.

I haven’t used any other photo hosting sites (specifically, I haven’t used Flickr, which is the one that gets the most mention) so I can’t really compare Google’s online offerings to much other than Gallery. The interface is, in standard Google style, pretty clean and pretty slick but the biggest draw is the integration between the different Google services. Not surprisingly, uploading albums from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums is essentially a one-click affair, but I was also surprised to be able to email photos from Picasa to anyone using my GMail account without needing to launch a separate browser window. There’s also a button to blog your photos with Blogger as well, but (not being a Blogger user) I haven’t tried it out.

It looks like you get a gig of space by default for your photos with an option to pay for more. If I ever get near that limit (I’m only at 33 megs right now) I might have to think about whether it makes sense to pay for hosting space and separate photo hosting space (I kind of think it doesn’t), but for the time being I think I’m going to start redirecting photos.uptoeleven.ca to my Google album.